Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.”

— Jeanette Winterson

302. “What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.”

— Jeanette Winterson

303. “When we learn to read, it’s a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.”

— Jeanette Winterson

304. “In the presence of love, hearth and quest become one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

305. “Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what’s in it until it’s too late!”

— Jeanette Winterson

306. “I did not realize that when money becomes a core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.”

— Jeanette Winterson

307. “A character has a distinctive voice – you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you’re out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it’s the character speaking and not you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

308. “Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.”

— Jeanette Winterson

309. “I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.”

— Jeanette Winterson

310. “Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.”

— Jeanette Winterson

311. “Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.”

— Jeanette Winterson

312. “As for myself, I am splintered by great waves. I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered. I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.”

— Jeanette Winterson

313. “What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

314. “Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.”

— Jeanette Winterson

315. “The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.”

— Jeanette Winterson

316. “It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.”

— Jeanette Winterson

317. “I love the natural world and I never ceased to see it. The beauty of the trees and fields, of hills and streams, of the changing colours, of the small creatures so busy and occupied. My long hours walking or sitting in the field with my back against the wall, watching the clouds and the weather, allowed me some steadiness. It was because I knew all this would be there when I was not that I thought I could go. The world was beautiful. I was as speck in it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

318. “You’ve got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I’m against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It’s frightening.”

— Jeanette Winterson

319. “And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.”

— Jeanette Winterson

320. “I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

321. “I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

322. “The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.”

— Jeanette Winterson

323. “Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.”

— Jeanette Winterson

324. “Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?”

— Jeanette Winterson

325. “My passion for her showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

— Jeanette Winterson

326. “The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.”

— Jeanette Winterson

327. “Shuttered like a fan no-one suspects your shoulder blades of wings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

328. “Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.”

— Jeanette Winterson

329. “It’s only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it – creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.”

— Jeanette Winterson

330. “Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”

— Jeanette Winterson

331. “If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.”

— Jeanette Winterson

332. “To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.”

— Jeanette Winterson

333. “The truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.”

— Jeanette Winterson

334. “When I was born, my father wanted to drown me, but my mother persuaded him to let me live in disguise, to see if I could bring any wealth to the household.”

— Jeanette Winterson

335. “It is the nature of walls that they should fall.”

— Jeanette Winterson

336. “Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.”

— Jeanette Winterson

337. “We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

338. “Don’t you think it’s strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That’s all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else’s face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?”

— Jeanette Winterson

339. “Language is what stops the heart exploding.”

— Jeanette Winterson

340. “Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.”

— Jeanette Winterson

341. “We walked in silence. Nature can cancel thought. We needed to walk and there was nothing more to say.”

— Jeanette Winterson

342. “When I say ‘I will be true to you’ I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

— Jeanette Winterson

343. “Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.”

— Jeanette Winterson

344. “In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.”

— Jeanette Winterson

345. “You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible.”

— Jeanette Winterson

346. “If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.”

— Jeanette Winterson

347. “If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”

— Jeanette Winterson

348. “She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.”

— Jeanette Winterson

349. “It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”

— Jeanette Winterson

350. “Slightest accidents open up new worlds.”

— Jeanette Winterson